Today, whilst doing some normal maintenance on some test servers, I saw:

sh ser

Lotus Domino (r) Server (Release 7.0 for UNIX) 10/04/2006 05:25:19 PM

Server name: Malaria/HADSL - Solaris 10 Server at Buchan Acres

Server directory: /space/malaria

Partition: .space.malaria

Elapsed time: 87 days 16:00:35

Now this isnt some super-whizzy 24 core beastie with a couple of gigs of RAM. This is a five year old Sparc 5 workstation (pizzabox) machine with 1gig, and running two test ND7 servers. (Waaay underspecced on memory, and running on a single 80 Gig IDE drive...) And since we're in the middle of a testing cycle right now, thousands of transactions per hour, for days on end. I bought this machine and the 21" monitor (45kgs of monitor!) for 500 euros two years ago...

I guess this is why you go out and buy mid-range unix tin such as Solaris, pSeries, etc. Because they're rock solid, and just keep going and going. Unlike the flakeware from Redmond, which needs rebooting at least once a week once you have that weeks patches installed.. iSeries customers in turn rave about their reliablilty, sneering at a mere 87 days uptime.. Personally, I view Solaris as the "Mac" of the unix world - very very simple to setup and get running. AIX - I've far more experience with - but its more like (or at least back in the v4.2 days when I did most of my AIX) they gave you a box of parts....(Dont for a second think that it somehow makes Solaris any less capable..)

I once had a Novell 3.11 server up for 365 DAYS straight, servicing 250 users all day every day. (A lovely Tricord Poweframe device) Whats your record ?